Ebook: Breeches and Metaphyics: Thackeray's German Discourse

The author traces the successive stages of Thackerays contact with the German world and analyses the discourse he developed as a result. The German Sketch Book which is built up embraces the fiction and criticism of Thackerays Paris Sketch Book and the impressions related by the cockney traveller in Irish Sketch Book and Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo. Thackerays own pictorial illustrations of his writings, and those by Cruikshank, Doyle and Walker, which he supervised and supplemented, are recognised as an integral part of his German discourse. This is the first full-length study, in any language, of Thackerays observation and presentation of Germany and the Germans in all the genres in which he worked. The study is a chronological one, setting Thackerays construction of Germany and the Germans against the background of his own development and of the social, industrial, cultural and political history of Britain and its continental neighbours.